Grid, Casco, Clearing and Montage
Marcel Smets


The end of the old antagonism between country and city has distorted the distinction between landscape, urbanism and architecture. The gradual merging of town and countryside into urbanized territories has also weakened the boundaries between the traditional disciplines, causing them to share a common frame of reference.
The strategies developed to plan these 'urbanized' territories are generally based on empty space. They are clearly embedded in the landscape tradition.
Issues such us: footloose economy based on an omnipresent network of communications and withdrawal of public authority reinforce the idea that investments follow their own logic and the construction of the city becomes all the more dependent on the fluctuations of the real-state market. This situation contributes no to have a real and visible relationship to their physical environment. Due to the isolation within the individual building requirement, the space 'in between' the pockets of development becomes all the more relevant as the site for a potential strategy to build coherence. It provides a way to address the intermediate terrain.


The aim of these paper if the show the way contemporary urban design addresses issues of 'uncertainly', and how to integrate this inevitable condition of 'uncertainty' in the construction of today environment.


To begin, urbanism requires a clear concept of spatial configuration.
There are four Design approaches to uncertainty that are based on spatial concepts:


The grid, can be either a pre-establish form, or a neutral base that is shaped by the architecture. In today's more sophisticated applications, such as the Seine Rive-Gauche development in Paris or the transformation of Poble Nou in Barcelona, the grid is used primarily as a device to attain flexibility. They investigate to what extent its constituent blocks can be disrupted while maintaining the basic character of the overall street plan as an ordering device. They want to establish a coherent and recognizable urban layout that, nevertheless, does not impede future opportunities.


The casco, unlike the grid, which is mostly superimposed on the landscape, the ‘casco’ or hull, is derived from it. It is based on local geological and hydrological conditions. As such, it can be consired the ideal natural frame that adapts to site conditions.
If the basic pattern –of land distribution, plot division, natural vegetation suited to the soil conditions – are maintained, they will also prevail in whatever migh be constructed in the ‘casco’gap. In essence, the device aims to establish order on a large scale for ‘higher’ nature as fundamental to landscape formation so as to allow flexibility for ‘lower’ nature on a smaller scale. (the vision of incremental growth is based on the gradual transformation of a conventional agricultural landscape: the field will change with the alternating crops, but the underlying structure of the land remains the same. To be really meaningful, the approach requires both a talented eye to perform the necessary scanning of existing landscape characteristics and a poetic ability to express them in a synthesizing new proposal.
In this approach, the form and the character of the landscape determine the program. Without exactly spelling out what should be built, they lay down the conditions to which whatever us being built should respond.


The clearing, this design method defines the landscape as a unifying backdrop. The idea of nature as a backdrop to assure the freedom of the intervention is now used as a systematic planning device. In some cases, as in MVRDV’s proposal for ‘light urbanism’, the original low-density settlement is maintained. The magnificence of the surrounding landscape prevails over the ongoing urbanization.
Unlike the ‘casco’ approach, where the landscape sets the conditions for the program, the ‘clearing’ has the program create the landscape.


The montage, principle of layering different levels. (Competition OMA/Rem Koolhaas for Parc de la Villete). The juxtaposition of different blocks, being a continuous sense of merging in thus produced, whereby each element is a part of many others. The montage emails, not only a constantly shifting understanding depending on the use of the area, but also generated a an architectural coherence in the perception of the urban landscape, precisely because it is made up of interpenetrating forms and fragments.